If there is one street that more than another has in it the spirit of
London it is Charing Cross Road. It begins with pickles and ends with
art; it joins Crosse and Blackwell to the National Gallery. In between
the two are bookshops, theatres, and music halls, and yet it is a
street without ostentation. No one in Charing Cross Road can be
assuming: no one could be other than genial and neighbourly. All good
books come there at last to find the people who will read them long
after they have been forgotten by the people who only talk about them.
Books endure while readers and talkers fade away, and Charing Cross
Road by its trade in books keeps alive the continuity of London's life
and deserves its fame. The books that reach this haven are for the
most part honest, and therefore many a weary soul turns out of the
streets where men and women swindle into this place where the thoughts
of honest men are piled on shelves, or put out in the open air in
boxes, marked twopence, fourpence, sixpence.... A real market this! A
fair without vanity. There are pictures to look at in the windows,
mementoes of dead artists and writers, and there is a constant stream
of people, the oddest mixture to be found anywhere on earth....
Everybody who has nothing very much to do goes to Charing Cross Road to
meet everybody who has dropped out of the main stream of humanity to
have a look at it as it goes by.
You can buy food in this delectable retreat--the best holiday ground in
England--and you can eat it in the ferocious book-shop kept by the
mildly-mannered man who called Clara's name blessed, and had her
photograph in his little dark room at the back of the shop.
Adnor Rodd always took his holidays in Charing Cross Road, for when he
went into the country he worked harder even than he did in London. He
wrote plays, and kept himself alive as best he could, because he hated
the theatre so much that he could never force himself through a stage
door. Silent, taciturn, he went on his way, caring for nothing but his
work, and sparing neither himself nor any one else in pursuing it.
He had started in London with money and friends, but work became such a
vice with him that he lost both, except just enough to keep him
alive--to go on working. Every now and then he was 'discovered' by a
playwright, a critic, or a literary man, but as he never returned a
compliment in his life 'discovery' never led very far.... A few people
knew that there was a strange man, called Rodd, who wrote masterpieces,
but simply would not or could not take advantage of the ordinary
commercial machinery to turn them into money or fame; but these few
raised their eyebrows or wagged their heads when he was mentioned.
Poor chap! He was out of the running, and never likely to become a
member of the Thespic Club, election to which makes a man a real
dramatist, whose name may be considered good for a week's business.
Rodd never thought in terms of business. He thought in terms of human
relationships, and out of them composed--never ceased
composing--dramas, vivid, ruthless, terrible. It was very bad for him,
of course, because it forced him into a strained detachment from the
life all around him, and when he met people he was always bent on
finding out what they were really thinking, instead of accepting what
they wished him to think was in their minds. He could no more do that
than he could use his considerable technical powers to concoct the
confectionery which in the theatre of those days passed, God save us,
for a play. He wanted to come in contact with the dramatic essence of
the people he met, but every one withheld it or protected him or
herself against him, and so he lived alone. For the sake of his work
he discarded the ordinary social personality which his education had
taught him to acquire, and he walked through the world exposed, rather
terrifying to meet; but so exquisitely sensitive that one acute
pleasure--a flower, a woman's smile, a strong man shaking hands with
his friend, a lovers' meeting, a real quarrel between two men who hated
each other, the attention of a friendly dog--could obliterate all the
horror and disgust with which most of what he saw and felt inspired
him. He was sure of himself as a wind is sure of itself, but he was
without conceit.... When he was very young, he had been discovered by
one or two women. That was enough. He knew that the desire of women
is not worth satisfying, and he left them alone unless they were in
distress, and then he helped them generally at the cost of their
thinking he was in love with them. Then he had to explain that he had
helped them as he would help a child or a sick man. Generally they
would weep and say he was a liar and a deceiver, but he knew what
women's tears are worth, and when they got that far left them to
prevent them going any further.... But he always had women to look
after him, women who were grateful, women who, having once tasted his
sympathy, could not do without it. His sympathy was passionate and to
some natures like strong drink. Very few men could stand it because it
went straight to the secret places of the heart, and men, unlike women,
do not care to face their own secrets.
He lived in three rooms at the top of a house in Bloomsbury, one for
his books, one for his work, and one for himself--for sleeping and
bathing. Unlike most men who are indifferent to the outside world he
was clean, because he found that slovenliness impaired his efficiency,
and took the edge off his energy. He was as fastidious mentally as a
trained athlete is physically.
He accepted good-humouredly the apparently unalterable incompatibility
between the theatre and the drama.
A man with a single aim seems mad in a world where aims are scattered,
but Rodd suffered a double isolation. Ordinary people regarded him as
a cracked fool, because he would not or could not exploit his gifts and
personality; while the people who really were cracked dreaded his
sanity and the humorous tolerance with which he indulged their little
weaknesses.
He enjoyed Charing Cross Road because it was rather like himself: it
was shovelled aside and disdained by its ignoble 'betters,' the streets
imposed by cosmopolitanism upon the real English London. That London
he could find in Charing Cross Road, where there still beat the heart
from which Fielding and Dickens had drawn their inspiration, the brave
heart that could laugh through all its sufferings and through all the
indignities put upon it. In Charing Cross Road he could meet almost
any day Falstaff and Doll Tearsheet, Tom Jones and Partridge, Sam
Weller and Sairey Gamp, and every day their descendants walked abroad,
passed in and out of shops, went about their business, little
suspecting that they would be translated into the world of art when
Rodd returned from his holiday to his work. He passionately loved this
London, the real London, and hated everything that denied it or seemed
to deny it. He loved it so greatly that he hardly needed any personal
love, and he detested any loyalty which interfered with his loyalty to
Shakespeare, Fielding, and Dickens, dramatists all, though Fielding's
drama had been too vital for the theatre of his time and had blown it
into atoms, so that since his day the actors had had to scramble along
as best they could and had done so well that they had forgotten the
drama altogether. They had evolved a kind of theatrical bas-relief,
and were so content with it that they regarded the rounded figures of
dramatic sculpture with detestation.... They dared not make room in
their theatre for _Hedda Gabler_ and _John Gabriel Borkman_, because
they destroyed by contrast the illusions with which they maintained
their activities.
The Scots bookseller was a great friend of Rodd's, and a loyal admirer,
though he did not in the least understand what the strange man was
about. Rodd used to talk of the virtue of an ordered world, while the
bookseller lived in dreams of Anarchy, men and women left alone so that
the good in them could come to the top and create a millennium of
kindliness. Rodd's researches into the human heart had revealed to him
only too clearly the terror that burns at the sources of human life,
but because the bookseller's dreams were dear to him, because they kept
him happy and benevolent, Rodd could never bring himself to push
argument far enough to disturb them.
One day in this fair summer of our tale, Rodd turned into the bookshop
to consume the lunch he had bought at the German Delicatessen-Magasin
up the road. He found the bookseller bubbling over with happiness,
dusting his books, re-arranging them, emptying large parcels of new
books, and not such very subversive books either except in so far as
all literature is subversive.
'Hallo!' said Rodd. 'I thought this was the slack season?'
'I'm rich,' retorted the bookseller. 'The dahned publishers are
crawling to me. They've had their filthy lucre, and they know I can
shift the stuff, and they're on their knees to me, begging me to take
their muck by the hundred--at my own price.'
(This was a pardonable exaggeration, but it was long since the
bookseller had had so much new stock.)
'If I ever want a change,' said Rodd, 'I'll get you to take me on as
your assistant.'
The bookseller's jaw dropped and he stared at Rodd.
'You might do worse,' he said. 'That's the second offer I've had this
year.'
'Oh! who made the first?'
'Ah!' The bookseller put his finger to his nose and chuckled. 'Ah!
Some one who's in love with me.'
'There are too many books,' said Rodd. 'Too much shoddy.'
He turned away to the shelves where the plays were kept--Shaw, Barker,
Galsworthy, Ibsen, Schnitzler, Hauptmann, Tschekov, Andreev, Claudel,
Strindberg, Wedekind, all the authors of the Sturm and Drang period,
when all over Europe the attempt was made to thrust literature upon the
theatre, in the endeavour, as Rodd thought, to break the tyranny of the
printed word. That was a favourite idea of his, that the tyranny of
print from which the world had suffered so long would be broken by the
drama. The human heart alone could break the obsessions of the human
mind, otherwise humanity would lose its temper and try to smash them by
cracking human heads.... Rodd always thought of humanity as an unity,
an organism subject to the laws of organic life. Talk about persons
and nations, groups and combinations, seemed to him irrelevant.
Humanity had a will, and everything had to comply with it or suffer.
At present it seemed to him that the will of humanity was diseased, and
that society here in London, as elsewhere, was inert. He escaped into
his imagination where he could employ to the full his dramatic energy.
On the whole he hated books, but his affection for the Charing Cross
Road, and for the bookseller, drew him to the shop dedicated to the
efforts of revolutionary idealists, whom he thought on the whole
mistaken. He desired not revolution but the restoration of the health
of humanity, and like so many others, he had his nostrum--the drama.
However, the air was so full of theories, social and political, that he
did not expect any one to understand him.
'Have you got Mann's new book?' he asked the bookseller, who produced
it: forty plates of Charles's pet designs with rather irrelevant
letterpress. Rodd bought it, and that moment Clara entered the shop.
Rodd paid no attention to her. The bookseller left him with his money
in his hand, and he stood turning over the pages of Charles's book, and
shaking his head over the freakish will o' the wisp paragraphs. Clara
spoke, and he stiffened, stared at the books in front of him, turned,
caught sight of her profile, and stood gazing in amazement--a girl's
face that was more than pretty, a face in which there was purpose, and
proof of clear perception.
After her holiday she was looking superbly well. Health shone in her.
She moved, and it was with complete unconcern for her surroundings.
She lived at once in Rodd's imagination, took her rightful place as of
course side by side with Beatrice, Portia, Cordelia, and Sophia
Western. His imagination had not to work on her at all to re-create
her, or to penetrate to the dramatic essence of her personality, which
she revealed in her every gesture.
He could not hear what she was saying, but her voice went thrilling to
his heart. He gasped and reeled and dropped Charles Mann's book with a
crash.
Clara, who had not seen him, turned, and she, too, was overcome. He
moved towards her, and stood devouring her with his eyes, and hers
sought his.
'This is Rodd,' said the bookseller. 'Adnor Rodd, a great friend of
mine.'
'Rodd,' repeated Clara.
'He is very much interested in the theatre,' said the bookseller.
'I was just looking at Charles Mann's new book.... Will you let me
give it you?'
He moved away to pick up the book and came back clutching it, took out
his fountain pen and wrote in it in a small, precise hand,--
'To my friend, from Adnor Rodd.'
'My name is Clara Day,' said she,
'You can't have a name yet.... You are just you.'
She understood him. He meant that externals were of no account in the
delighted shock of their meeting. As they stood gazing at each other
the book-shop vanished, London disappeared, there was nothing but they
two on all the earth. Neither could move. The beginning and the end
were in this moment. Nothing that they could do could alter it or make
the world again as it had been for them.... Consciously neither
admitted it, both stubbornly clung to what they had made of their lives.
He still held the book in his hand. She had not put out hers for it.
He wrote 'Clara Day,' and he wanted to write it down several times as
he did with the names of the persons in his plays, to make certain that
they were rightly called.
With a faintly recurrent sense of actuality he thought of his three
rooms in Bloomsbury and of the hundred and fifty pounds a year on which
he lived, and with a wry smile he handed her the book, took stock of
her rich clothes, bowed and turned away.... For his imagination it was
enough to have met and loved her in that one moment. She had broken
down the intellectual detachment in which he lived: the icy solitude in
which so painfully he struggled on was at an end.
So quickly had he moved that she was taken by surprise, and he had
reached the threshold of the shop before she ran after him and touched
him on the arm.
'Please,' she said. 'You have forgotten one thing--the date.'